Now

Updated August 2025

Day-to-day: Senior Software Engineer at Optum.

I work on building a market-leading patient management platform EMIS-X for GPs and clinicians in the UK.

Current picks: #

Videos and presentations ▶️

These have stuck with me recently and informing what practices I bring to my team and how I navigate my career

• Kent Beck, Tidy First - GOTO Conf 2024

• Reflecting on Continuous Delivery
  (Dave Farley and Jez Humble)

• Martin Fowler Interview: Refactoring - Book Overflow pod

Reading 📚

Really in to audiobooks, but also rediscovering the tactile reading experience of print:

• Accelerate, Humble, Kim et al

• An Elegant Puzzle, Will Larson

• Staff Engineer, Will Larson

• Being an Effective Engineering Manager, Dr. James Stanier

• I Love you, Byeee, Adam Buxton

• An Emotional Education, Alain de Botton, School of Life 💭

• A Therapeutic Journey, Alain de Botton, School of Life 💭 , Alain de Botton, School of Life

Classics which I frequently reflect on and are my compass for life and work:

• Atomic Habits 🍬, James Clear

• Deep Work 🧠, Cal Newport

• The Meditations 🔥, Marcus Aurelius

Podcasts 🎧

• The Engineering Room, Dave Farley

• Blindboy Podcast

• Book Overflow

Thinking about

• Trusting in myself and my experience, and step up to the challenges I see around me. I'm developing a sense of feeling worthy of expressing myself. That nothing has to be perfect, and it's more important to just do, gather feedback and refine.

In art, do something, and find your voice and style later. But you only get to do that after repeatedly doing the thing. Writing, drawing, speaking up, articulating an idea to build influence.

This gives us data on which to edit. You can't improve a blank canvas, but once there's something on it, we have data.

In work #

• How I can help my team to implement some of the ideas from Accelerate, challenge established thinking and working which no longer serve us in our journey toward CI/CD and TBD.

• I want to coach us to be brave enough to realise the benefits of optimising for feedback; reducing hand offs, hidden work, and latency by using long-live branches, isolating us from the current state of the system.

• If there is no passion and personal investment from individuals in a team, mediocrity grows and is allowed to prevail, and infects the culture.

• Inertia is all around us, and few will step up to the challenge of right action at personal risk, but that is not an exciting, impactful way to approach our work

• As a HSP, I want to develop a reputation for consistency—not necessarily always agreeable, but predictably thoughtful, direct, and steady in how I respond and act. As a highly sensitive person, I’m acutely aware of shifts in tone, subtext, and glimpses into real emotion. These variations can cloud collaboration or introduce second-guessing in communication to me. By minimising variability in my own tone and responses, I remove ambiguity ain my own responses to encourage someone to be open and straight-forward with me as well, trusting my own response as sincere and consistently honest.

• Being deliberate with how I spend time. Having systematically cutting out much 'low value' time sinks and unplugging from social media, there is much time available. I need to be deliberate with using it to foster meaningful relationships and towards fulfilling things like developing my art skills and reflection on my goals and values

• Challenging myself to draw more, even if it's rubbish, and share it on my drawing instagram martino_draws

Thanks for taking an interest!

My Now page is inspired by Derek Sivers' 'Now' page concept. Find out about Now pages.